Tin Charm – SN

I have probably said it about a dozen times on these pages before but the music scene in Dublin in the mid-90’s was a pretty exciting place to be. Not so much because of the bands that were visiting but because the local scene was ablaze. Most of the action was happening Northside with Parnell Street and parts of Phibsboro offering up bright new recordings. One of the upstarts from that all too short scene was Sunbear (check out a re-release or two here) who you may remember from their grainy videos that seemed to pop up on RTE’s ‘No Disco’ every other week. The band channelled the sweetest form of shoegaze imaginable and I’m quite sure were quite unaware about how good they were or how big they could have become. In the interim various members of Sunbear reconvened with a more direct pop focused vehicle called the Ruby Tailights. True there were still plenty of guitars but the haze of distortion for the most part was dispensed with. With that band’s demise there was a fallow period for all concerned until earlier this year when lead singer Martin Kelly, drummer Patrick Moran and newbie Anton Hegarty started recording songs for a new project called Tin Charm, the results of which can be heard on new album ‘The Engine is Bleeding’. The band’s sound is a direct correlation with that of Sunbear with guitars fighting for attention with Kelly’s remarkably youthful vocals. Opening track ‘SN’ is perhaps best representative of the goods on offer and could easily have complimented anything that Sunbear released back in the 1990’s. As is still their way promo shots are a rare commodity but we can forgive that given that ‘The Engine is Bleeding’ was rightfully given a vinyl release (it is free to download from bandcamp). So good to have them back. Be sure to check out a Sunbear classic below. KD